1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to application servers and more specifically to facilitating a service application to operate with different service frameworks.
2. Related Art
Application servers refer to server systems which provide web services accessible from other systems according to a contract. A contract specifies the format of invoking a web service (sending the request), the format of the response, etc. The contract is specified in a structured format such as XML, which makes the content machine-understandable. Other systems can request such contracts on a network and then invoke the services according to the received specification. Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) is a common language used for specifying contracts for web services, as is well known in the relevant arts.
Service frameworks (hereafter “frameworks”) and service applications are generally executed in application servers to provide such web services. As is well known, a framework processes web service requests received according to a contract by interacting with service applications. To facilitate such interaction, the framework defines an interface according to which each service application is to be implemented. Each service application contains the program logic underlying the web services, and in addition, needs to be implemented according to defined interface to operate with the framework.
It is often desirable that a service application operate with different service frameworks in application servers.
In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.